Statistics

The unmentioned, underutilized, and novel

There’s a seemingly endless amount of hockey statistics. Many are commonplace, such as shots and goals. Some are openly debated, e.g., plus-minus (+/-). Some are often overlooked, like icing and offside events, or independently researched but not implemented on a large scale, e.g., shot quality. The backbone of icetistics.com focuses on those stats that are often overlooked, not commonly implemented, or completely novel in nature. Follow the links below to learn more.

Rebounds

The NBA tracks rebounds as part of their nominal suite of player and team statistics. The NHL does not.

But what if rebounds were tracked in the NHL? Would this give us more insight into a team’s performance? Would this allow us to generate analyses never seen before in the NHL? We’ve set out to answer these questions.

We generated logic and to quantify offensive and defensive rebounds within play-by-play data. By quantifying these metrics we inherently quantified a goaltender’s “cough-up” percentage, i.e., the percentage of saves not held onto by the goalie divided by the total number of the goalie’s saves).

Tables 1 shows an example of defensive and offensive rebound percentages for NHL teams during the 2018-2019 season. Table 2 provides a small snippet of goaltender save percentages, cough up rates, and hold rates (i.e., saves held onto by the goaltender)

*Table1: Small snippets of offensive and Defensive percentages for NHL teams. Table 2: Example of goaltender save percentages and cough up and hold rates*